


live in salt

by thescrewtapedemos



Category: Dunkirk (2017), Historical RPF
Genre: Grief/Mourning, Past Character Death, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, it's hilarious that dunkirk is actually rpf if you think about it
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-14
Updated: 2017-08-14
Packaged: 2018-12-15 02:58:18
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,316
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11796987
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thescrewtapedemos/pseuds/thescrewtapedemos
Summary: i should leave it alone but you're not righti should live in salt for leaving you behind





	live in salt

**Author's Note:**

> title and summary from i should live in salt by the national. considering how much gryles i've read lately it's ASTONISHING this is the first thing i've ever written w harry styles in it. 
> 
> enjoy!! xoxo

He jerks awake again because the train is rocking. 

The hum of the locomotive is the hum of a ship’s engine. The rails rattling under them is the rattle of the rigging, the roar of the wind is pounding across the waves. He is drenched in sweat, he smells of tar. 

He looks out the window. The sun is blazing down against the green fields and he stares at them and it’s not real. It’s not real. 

The waves are green. 

He looks at Alex. 

Alex is asleep, swaying in the rocking of the train. Mouth loose, hair an oil-tangled disarray against his forehead. There are circles under his eyes dark as anything, a scratch from temple to jaw Tommy doesn’t remember how Alex had acquired. His mouth trembles, once, and Tommy thinks maybe he’s speaking in his dreams. 

There are lines etched into his forehead, between his brows, the deep carved valleys around his nose. He can’t be older than twenty five. Tommy doesn’t know his last name. 

He sits back and watches the waves crash against the side of the traincar. 

\--

Alex jolts awake with the sound of the horn and Tommy watches him do it. Watches the awareness wash across his face and there is nothing, he thinks, like this hatred. 

Alex looks at him and flinches. Tommy wonders what he’s seeing. He wonders if he’s seeing what Tommy sees when he looks at Alex. 

“We’re home,” he says, which is not what he wants to say, but still something to crack the silence. 

They’re not alone but they might as well be. There are men around them on all sides but all any of them can hear is the roar of the hungry sea, the screams of men and metal bending and breaking together. They carry the smell of the sea with them here, the smell of salt and old water and metal. They are all stranded, still. 

Something completely unlike relief finds itself in the cast of Alex’s mouth. 

“We are,” he says and then the station is pulling up to them and the clamour folds them up in its arms. 

\--

The newspapers say they’re heroes. Tommy doesn’t feel heroic, under the hands reaching out to pat him, the beseeching mouths. 

He disembarks with Alex right in front of him, into the noise of a million voices. So many, gathered to welcome them, to ask for news, to beg for hope. He turns his face away and focuses on the back of Alex’s head. 

He fords the waves in Alex’s wake until they fetch up at someone with a clipboard, a suit, an air about him that whispers _officer_. 

“Where y’from?” he asks Tommy and he stares because there had been an address once but god help him, he can’t remember it. 

“Dunkirk,” he says, and the man’s face shutters. Alex stays silent. 

“Well,” the man says, helpless. “We’ll board you ‘til that’s sorted out, then.” 

“Together,” Alex says, and when the man looks at them he straightens. He’s taller than he’d looked in the water, Tommy thinks, and they had spent time on land so it shouldn’t be surprising, and yet. The only thing he can remember is the water. “We’ll be boarded together. We got evacuated together, we...” 

He trails into silence. 

The man looks at Tommy and for a moment he thinks of turning away. The hatred beats bitter in his mouth like oil. 

“Together,” he says. 

The man writes something down and hands them a slip of paper with an address. 

“Off you go,” he says and gestures on. 

\--

He jerks awake. He jerks awake. He jerks awake. 

The bed is still. There’s no rocking, no movement of boat on water or train on rail, and it’s dangerous, to be still is dangerous. To be under cover is dangerous, he can barely hear the celebration outside so he would never be able to hear the hum of a Nazi engine, the beat of propeller turning the air into impending death. 

He can’t fucking sleep. He can, but he doesn’t want to, he doesn’t want the beat of his heart against his ribs, he doesn’t want what waits behind his eyelids in the dark. 

Across the room Alex tosses too, tosses like the sea. He dreams, and when he’s turned to Tommy it’s possible to make out that his mouth barely stops its tremble. 

Tommy watches him sleep. 

\--

Alex is quieter the next day. The dreams he’d battled the night before are written across his face, not in detail so much as effect. Glassy eyes, bloodless mouth. His nails are bitten to the quick, Tommy realizes as he hands across the mug of tea at breakfast. 

A proper English breakfast. The family hosting them treats them like ghosts, like the dead, like they carry with them still the smell of the sea. They might, still. Tommy can’t be sure. 

He’d washed, over and over. Scrubbed the sea and the oil from him until his skin was raw and stinging, until Alex had pounded on the door for his turn in the shower. He can still smell it. 

He looks at himself in the mirror as he shaves and the person in the reflection isn’t him but it hardly bothers him. His face is a blur, his features overexposed and indistinct. 

It doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter. 

They report and debrief. Hours in line and then twenty minutes with a clerk, pale-faced and soft-handed. Rattling off their rank, their commander, the positions assigned to them before the madness had come to Dunkirk. Their lists of the known dead. Tommy feels the names on his tongue as they pass, an awful finality, his words put down in ink. 

He watches the man pause as he says _Gibson_. 

“We need more than a last name, son,” the man says kindly. Tommy looks at him and his kindness and he knows now what it means to be animal. 

“Write it down,” he says. “Write it the fuck down.” 

The man writes the name down on the page. The rest of Gibson’s information is a row of question marks. _English_ , the man writes. Tommy watches impassively and then he’s let free and the sun is bright against the pavement but it’s nothing like the brightness of the sun against the sea. 

Alex finds him like it’s fated. 

“Well,” he says, and silences when Tommy looks at him. 

\--

He thinks, later, night come again to wrap them all up, that he will die like this. Day after day after crawling day, listing off the dead again and again. 

The bed is too still. The bed is too fucking still and Alex’s eyes glitter at him in the dim moonlight through their open window. 

Alex doesn’t flinch when Tommy slips from his covers. Doesn’t flinch as he pads across the floorboards to the edge of Alex’s bed. Doesn’t stop him from pulling the covers back and slipping in. 

It’s warm, between them. The heat of two bodies in an enclosed space. Alex’s eyes are as dark in the night as they ever are but they still shine so pale. His hair is a tangle against the white pillowcase. Tommy can’t read his expression. 

He thinks, inevitably, of Dunkirk. He thinks of eyes in the dark that aren’t Alex’s, are attached to a name he doesn’t know and never will know. He thinks of a hand in his and he thinks he could vomit with it. 

“You,” he says and wishes he could spit the words he wants to say. Wishes he could spit _you killed him_ and have it be the truth. 

Alex blinks and the first tear spills from the corner of his eye, tracking across the white plane of his temple. Tommy reaches out with a trembling hand to touch the trail of it. Touching the sea, the salt water against his fingertips.


End file.
